Burton J. Smith: Architect of the supercomputer;Forecast: High touch;

Page 1

Burton J. Smith
Rrcnicecc
of trie
supercomputer
Rt eight-thirty in the morning, as is his custom
on every working day, Burton J. Smith
pulled up to his parking slot in his 1982 Jeep
stationwagon. He cut the ignition, climbed down
from the driver's seat, and headed for the low
building ahead of him.
Around him were miles of brown-stubbed flatlands
that led up to the Rockies in the distance. Once they
were dotted with horse ranches; now they are the
suburbs of Denver.
Oblivious to the scenery, Smith entered his office,
gestured his visitor to a seat, and responded to a
question about his role in today's history of the
supercomputer. "I'm not an inventor; I'm an archi­tect,"
he began. "I take a little bit of engineering, a
little bit of art, some intuition and guesswork, and the
tiniest bit of science—and I put things together in
new ways."
He settled his bearish frame into his chair. "I work
with existing materials, but I live in a world of
abstractions and symbols. Everything I do goes
directly from here," he said, pointing to his forehead,
"to there," he said, pointing to the notepad on his desk.
At 42, Burton J. Smith, Sc.D., is vice-president,
research and development, of Denelcor, Inc. And
arguably, as principal "architect" of Denelcor's HEP 1
supercomputer, Burton Smith is among the most
important people in the history of electronic
computing since J. Presper Eckert and John W.
Mauchly joined forces to develop the first practical
electronic computer, the ENIAC, at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1946.
What makes a computer a supercomputer is speed,
not size. Supercomputers perform in millionths of a
second (referred to as microseconds) what a typical
home computer 'would take thousandths of a second
to perform. To put a perspective on this sort of speed,
consider the fact that the Denelcor HEP 1, operating at
full capacity, can perform 160 operations per micro­second—
and that there are more microseconds in a
minute than there are minutes in a century.
These blinding speeds are faster by factors of
unimaginable magnitude than any business computer
on the market. The world's first supercomputer, a
custom-built machine financed by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, computed the
dynamics of airflow around the engine of a rocket.
The job took 18 hours. Machines are now in the
planning stages that could do it in around 10 seconds.
The stakes are extremely high. As science writer
William J. Broad recently pointed out in the New York
Times, "No computer is now powerful enough, for
example, to simulate the airflow around an entire
aircraft, so aerodynamic designs are often put
together in piecemeal fashion or by the repeated
processing of two-dimensional slices. The first
country with computers that can design a plane as a
whole, according to a report by the National Science
Foundation, 'will undoubtedly produce planes with
superior performance.'"
Last year, a team of researchers from the Los
Alamos National Laboratory and the Livermore
National Laboratory came back from a fact-finding
trip to Japan with a troubling report: backed by
nearly a billion dollars in funding over a ten-year
period, the Japanese are embarked on programs to
produce supercomputers at least a thousand times
more powerful than anything produced today.
According to the U.S. investigating team, the Japanese
see a need for large-scale computing capability in
such areas as nuclear fusion, electrical power-system
analysis, structural and thermal analyses of satellites,
and the design and simulation of leading-edge
semiconductor devices.
Breakthroughs in supercomputing are increasingly
based on advances in "architecture," that is, on the
way a computer goes about processing its problems;
and this is the area in which Dr. Smith is making his
main contribution. Cray Research and Control Data—
the only other American companies making super­computers—
use conventional, sequential processing:
one part of a problem must be completed before the
next part can be started. Smith's supercomputer is